Plug and Pray rant

[Howard Coles]

On 1/29/07, Art Alexion <art.alexion at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> On Monday 29 January 2007 13:41, Nigel Ridley wrote:
> > Just added a newish LCD 17" to a simple Compaq DesktopPro machine which
> > is probably about 4 or 5 years old.
> > Anyway, as soon as X kicked in (got to the login screen) the [LCD]
> > screen pops up a message saying "Out of Range"; so I did an Ctrl Alt F1
> > to get to a terminal and after logging in did the 'dpkg-reconfigure
> > xserver xorg'. After answering the questions as best I could and letting
> > the auto-detect stuff do their thing, I restarted the computer. It
> > wouldn't load X.
>
> I am going to guess that this is a wide screen format, and that you were
> trying to use the wide screen settings.  There is an Ubuntu wiki for doing
> this.  The problem is that settings that shouldn't work, work better.
>
> I found that 1024x768 works perfectly with my 16:9 screen though it
> shouldn't.
> A support guy at Norwood, my monitor manufacturer, told me it worked with
> his.
>

I have also found that sometimes you just have to plug the values in
manually to the xorg.conf file because the newer monitors just haven't made
their way fully into the autoconfig tools yet.  Its not that there isn't a
config tool, its just that the particular monitor you are using isn't really
understood by the config files yet.

You see, even though the monitor reports to Linux exactly what kind of
monitor it is, it doesn't mean that Linux knows what that means.  For
example, I have a Viewsonic A90F at home, and it appeared (when it was first
purchased) that Linux recognized it perfectly because the name and model
showed up.  However, when it went to set it up the hardware db had no idea
what the settings should be.  All Linux (and I"m using this term VERY
loosely to generalize hardware ID routines) is doing is taking what the
monitor said it was and showing it to me.  The Hardware ID process tries its
best to match what it got with something it has in the hardware db, but
there may not be a match.  There are just too many new gadgets and widgets
coming out with no Linux support for devs to keep up with everything, so
they do the best they can.

I can sacrifice this functionality because I understand the hurtle they have
to jump now better than I used to.  However, the thing that still pegs my
aggravation meter is that there still is no simple "setup" routine for
software.  Why can't software come with an install routine, or why can't
distros setup a process that takes source and compiles and installs it with
a click of the mouse (and knowing the root password for either)?  I believe
then, you could go by Linux software off the wal-mart shelf and more end
users would be migrating more often.  This would then lead to more hardware
support, and fewer problems like Nigel and many others have to report.

-- 
See Ya'
Howard Coles Jr.
John 3:16!
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